Homes for Sale in Ucluelet, BC

Living in Ucluelet

The road from Port Alberni ends at a junction — left to Tofino, right to Ucluelet — and visitors who arrive at Pacific Rim have been making this choice since Highway 4 was paved. Tofino got famous first and has never stopped being famous. Ucluelet got a different kind of reputation: the working harbour, the fishing boats, the community that hadn't entirely converted itself into a tourism economy, the Wild Pacific Trail built by a retired man with a chainsaw and a vision of what a coastal community owed its own coastline. Buyers who have discovered Ucluelet have discovered what Tofino was before it became what Tofino is — the same Pacific environment, the same Barkley Sound, the same waves arriving from storms crossing the open ocean, at prices that reflect a community still in the process of understanding what it has rather than one that has already priced the understanding in.

The Wild Pacific Trail is the community's most significant achievement in making itself accessible to visitors on foot — 8.5 kilometres circling the headland through old-growth Sitka spruce whose root systems grip wave-battered bedrock that the Pacific has been carving for millennia, past the Amphitrite Point lighthouse where the fog horn operated through decades of Coast Guard service, along shores where the open ocean arrives without any land between Ucluelet and Japan. Barkley Sound extends north from Ucluelet's harbour through the Broken Group Islands — 100 islands and islets in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve that constitute one of Canada's premier sea kayaking destinations, requiring commitment to access and offering rewards proportional to that commitment in wildlife, isolation, and the extraordinary experience of paddling among seal colonies and humpback whales in a national park accessible only by water. The harbour itself serves both the commercial fleet targeting halibut and prawns in the outer Sound, and the sport fishing charters that run for chinook salmon and bottom fish from a wharf that smells of diesel and brine rather than tourist souvenir shops.

Ucluelet's property market reflects the same environment as Tofino's at a significant discount — a discount that has been narrowing as buyers have discovered what the discount purchases. The community's genuine working character, the Wild Pacific Trail, the Barkley Sound access, and the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve at the doorstep have attracted a residential population that values the west coast environment without requiring Tofino's amenities at Tofino's prices. Port Alberni is 100 kilometres east for the region's hospital and main services, and the drive through the mountains on Highway 4 — past Kennedy Lake and over Sutton Pass — is the commute that west coast living extracts as its fee.